Conventional storage environments typically comprise storage resources from many different vendors. The storage resources may be procured from different vendors to provide a specific type of storage within the storage environment such as, for example, high reliability storage, fast access storage, minimum cost storage, etc. Each vendor provides a proprietary interface and management software for each type of storage device. Consequently, storage provisioning for these conventional storage environments is difficult. The task of storage provisioning in such a complex storage environment is made more difficult by the many layers of storage virtualization typically used in complex storage environments.
Conventional storage provisioning is performed manually, involving a large number of people, processes, and policies. Conventional storage provisioning is time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone. Alternatively, conventional storage provisioning is performed by developing customized workflows in specific user environments; these workflows cannot be easily used in or ported to other environments.
Automated storage provisioning in conventional storage environments is a difficult task due to a lack of integrated storage management across different storage entities and different storage vendors, a lack of standard non-proprietary interfaces to manage storage resources provided by different storage vendors, and a lack of automatic translation of high-level application requirements into low-level resource capabilities.
What is needed to provide a uniform solution to the problem of storage management is a common data model to represent all the layers of storage virtualization in a uniform manner, standard services associated with the entities in the data model that can easily enable storage management services, and a policy framework that allows mapping high-level application requirements to low-level storage plans and resource capabilities.
Thus, there is a need for a system, a computer program product, and an associated method for providing automated storage provisioning in complex data center environments. The need for such a solution has heretofore remained unsatisfied.